A preliminary study of ovarian cancer finds that in most cases it actually arises in the Fallopian tubes. If confirmed, the study could give rise to advances in treating this difficult cancer.

“We may have been making incorrect assumptions about it for many decades,” said study leader Dr. Victor Velculescu. “This is a cancer that actually is not an ovarian cancer. It’s really a Fallopian tube cancer that is seeding the ovaries, and that’s that has important consequences for how we think about this cancer, how we develop new drugs.”

Before that can happen, larger studies are needed to confirm the findings, said Velculescu, a professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

The study was performed by scientists at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania and Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston. It was published Monday in Nature Communications.